This article explores the response of the postcolonial state to the question of widow immolation – sati. It demonstrates that the conversation on the practice of sati at the high point of Hindu law reform in the 1950s reflected the simultaneous pressures on the new democracy to establish rule of law while also accommodating the renewed reverence for tradition and religious custom in an independent nation state. Distinct from the colonial response to sati that treated women as either “helpless and pathetic” or “brave and valiant,” post-independence police records describe women committing sati mostly as “insane” or “not in their senses,” and yet chiefly responsible for their actions. The article contrasts administrative and parliamentary narratives of the crime. Local belief in miracles surrounding the performance of sati not only obscured the experience of the woman's suffering but also made collection of evidence in such a case particularly difficult. This rendered convictions of the abettors of such “painless suicide by insane women” weaker. Legal interventions in sati eventually prompted administrative responses to shift from emphasizing the “uncontrollability” of the spectacle to deeming the spectacle a necessary precondition in distinguishing a sati from suicide.

The 1950s represent a foundational decade in Nepal's constitutional history. In the wake of decolonization in British India, the “year 7 revolution” (1950–51) grew out of the alliance between King Tribhuvan Shah and Nepal's democratic political parties created in India against the Rana autocratic regime in Kathmandu. Eventually the pro-democracy forces prevailed, and a crucial political transition began. Two constitutions were promulgated, the 1951 Interim Constitution and the 1959 Constitution. Both short lived and only partially implemented, these documents, however, laid the foundations of Nepal's constitutional edifice for years to come. Constitution building became a marker of sovereignty understood in terms of independence and an assertion of popular sovereignty. However, in the fraught Cold War context, the preoccupation with securing political stability by constitutional means that centered around the Shah monarchy prevailed, even at the expense of democracy. As such, the shift from a traditional notion of sovereignty from above to a modern concept of sovereignty from below remained incomplete. These aspirations, however, were not extinguished even by 30 years of royal autocracy under the Panchayat regime (1960–90) and lived on to this day to inform demands for constitutional reform, democratization, and inclusion. The present analysis is based on Nepali primary legal sources, archival material from the United Kingdom and United States National Archives, and the Ivor Jennings Private Papers.

Many rulers of newly formed Indian Princely States enacted substantial administrative reforms in the first half of the nineteenth century as they sought to reinforce their power and secure revenue in the wake of British colonial conquest. In one such case, the ruler of Alwar, Banni Singh, recruited Aminullah Khan, a former record-keeper in Delhi's colonial courts, to serve as diwan (chief minister) and undertake administrative reforms starting in 1838. These reforms focused on agrarian taxation, the civil courts, and the military, and included changes to the roles of local officials, methods of record-keeping, and the language of governance. The reforms were encoded in seven slim volumes of regulations and model forms, handwritten in Persian. Through a study of these regulations, I situate the reforms of Alwar's administration within Banni Singh's broader self-fashioning as a modern ruler in a Mughal mode and show how the reforms drew from both Mughal and colonial ideas of statecraft. The regulations represented a shift toward a legalistic conception of that state as seen in the ideals of good governance that they espoused, and they constructed contractual relationships among villagers, low-level officials in the districts, and the central state through the extensive bureaucratic procedures that they encoded.

In recent decades, the rule of law has not been commonly associated with Afghanistan. Instead, its politics have been more likely to be framed in terms of lawlessness and ungovernability. But this trope does not do justice to Afghanistan's longer history of statehood or experiences of constitution-making. Over the course of the twentieth century, Afghan leaders drafted seven constitutions (in 1923, 1931, 1964, 1976, 1980, 1987, and 1990). These constitutions represented leaders’ attempts to assert their legitimacy and enforce their vision of an Afghan nation-state. This article sheds fresh light on Afghan elites’ top-down framing of Afghan national identity through ethnolinguism, exploring the legalization of Pashto as both an official and national language in Afghanistan's constitutions. Reformers intended Pashto to transgress community, kinship, and regional boundaries and act as a source of unity (though one in which ethnolinguistic minorities had little say). Tracing Afghanistan's constitutional history from 1923–90, this article reveals language as a constitutional arena for debating Afghan modernity and identity. As such, this article integrates Afghanistan into legal histories of South Asia while emphasizing how Afghan constitutionalists engaged in the process of law-making as a means of expressing Afghanistan's own independence and ideas of modernity.

Within the medieval Catholic Church, the term ‘clandestine betrothal’ was associated with the absence of witnesses, solemnities, and other formalities. Parental consent was not a legal requirement for betrothal or marriage, which was based on the free decision of the spouses. However, Martin Luther held that the will of the parties was not sufficient, because the couple was joined by God, and God’s will was reflected in parental consent. Luther intended the parents to be a public authority, and he therefore proposed a different definition of clandestine marriage that combined the absence of witnesses with the lack of parental approval. Medieval canonists had enumerated numerous types of clandestine betrothal. However, in their treatises, the jurists Johannes Schneidewin, Conrad Mauser, and Joachim von Beust translated Luther’s definition into legal terms, reducing the types of clandestine betrothal to only two. The first type, absence of witnesses, continued to be regulated by canon law, with some exceptions. The second, lack of parental approval, was governed by Roman law reinterpreted according to Scripture. Cardinal Bellarmine criticized this definition as confused, prompting the Lutheran theologians Paul Tarnov and Johann Gerhard to reply that ‘clandestine’ had acquired a new meaning: violation of the law imposing parental approval.

Animal–human history is an increasingly popular area of historical research.1 Diana Donald's 2020 book, Women Against Cruelty: Protection of Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of animal protection and the role women have played in moral reform movements. Starting from the premise that the prevention of cruelty to animals is “a pure product of the nineteenth century” (p. 7), this dazzling book takes its reader through a wide range of important topics such as the early history of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), differences between men and women's attitudes toward animals, and the role women played in humane education.2 This review will particularly highlight the way that Donald consistently attacks reductionist theses that discount the genuine concern women had for animals in the nineteenth-century British animal protection movement, and how her interpretations consistently refocus our attention on historical evidence of that genuine concern.

The 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion figures prominently in scholarship on modern Britain, colonial Jamaica, and the British Empire, as a milestone of post-emancipation protest, a turning point in British race-thinking, and a focal point for debates on martial law and British justice. This article presents a new interpretation of the rebellion’s legal and political significance. Focused on processes of formal inquiry, I argue that legal analysis reshaped the political “moral” of the event. For the rebellion’s participants and some British observers, Morant Bay challenged the practice of colonial rule. But beginning with the royal commission of inquiry called to investigate the suppression, formal inquiry displaced the systemic critique that had largely motivated the uprising. Focused increasingly on the nature of martial law and culminating in the criminal prosecution of Jamaica’s colonial governor, legal debate and analysis transformed the scandal’s moral center and turned Morant Bay into a new justification for further and more centralized imperial control. In developing these arguments, the article examines law’s capacity to read, write, and exclude competing narratives of empire. In so doing, it contributes to scholarship on scandal and legitimation, and offers a new interpretation of a seminal nineteenth-century debate on the use of martial law.

Hermann Kantorowicz crossed the Atlantic twice: to take up a visiting professorship at Columbia Law School in the summer of 1927, and to find refuge at New York's University in Exile in 1933/1934. Between his first and second stay, the German-Jewish émigré changed his mind about America and its law fundamentally. While he had—patronizingly—praised his US colleagues for “catch[ing] up… intellectually” in 1927, he accused them of “destroy[ing] the Law itself” in 1934. Reconstructing Kantorowicz's change of heart, my article uncovers just how open the transatlantic 1930s still were in jurisprudential matters. As leader of the so-called “free law” movement, Kantorowicz had sparked a turn to “life” in German legal science in the years before World War I. Throughout the 1920s, he had then watched contentedly, as American “realist” scholars drew on free law ideas for their own critical projects. By 1934, however, Kantorowicz could not help but notice parallels between New Deal and Nazi law. To his mind, both Roosevelt's and Hitler's jurists had started turning his moderate free law ideas into a radical—and dangerous—legal nihilism: in designating law as life's only source, they shunned scientific legal methods. In light of these concerns, my article excavates life-law's delicate suspension between peril and potential. My sources reveal a striking, triangular relationship between German free law, American legal realism, and Nazi life-jurisprudence.

This article argues that American jurists fashioned new understandings about the capacity of states to legislate about marriage through regulating the intimate lives of enslaved and newly freed individuals. This article does so through analyzing the creation and impact of a little-studied 1809 law in New York that legalized the marriages of enslaved people—while individuals were still enslaved—as part of the state's process of gradual emancipation, which occurred from 1799 to 1827. In New York, by legalizing enslaved people's marriages, jurists privatized financial liabilities within soon-to-be freed families. The law stood at odds with national juridical understanding about marital regulation. Jurists in the early republic were uncertain about whether states could legislate about matrimony. Southern states after the Civil War then cited and replicated New York's logic in legislating to legalize the marriages of freedpeople, similarly privatizing financial claims within families. In the cases of both New York and national emancipation, jurists, in choosing privatization, foreclosed possibilities for a different or broader vision of state support for freedpeople, such as reparations. After making marital laws about slavery, both New York and Southern states created and/or tightened their marriage laws, further inscribing understandings of the marital family into American governance. This piece contributes to historiographies of slavery, the American state, and intimacy.

This article unravels an important historical conjuncture in the making of modern US citizenship and alienage by drawing on the state's regulation of naturalization as it relates to Asian immigration in the early twentieth century. My primary concern is to examine the socio-legal formations that constructed the thick distinctions between the modern US citizen and alien along the lines of racial difference and racial capital. Specifically, this article argues that Asian immigration to the United States remade the modern US citizen and alien in two significant and interconnected ways. First, it underscores how the adjudication of race in US courts and connected political campaigns re-mapped race in the United States and sharpened the racialization of Asia and Europe in profound ways that ultimately produced immigrants from southern, central, and eastern parts of Asia as the modern US alien. Second, the debate over Asian immigrants’ eligibility to naturalize refashioned legal status as a normative avenue to sustain a regime of racial capital. It cast citizenship as a legal avenue for White men and families to acquire and protect a proprietary interest in citizenship and recast some Asian immigrants as permanent aliens in a period when alienage came to signify disposable immigrant labor. The article concludes by distinguishing how the struggle for US citizenship by Asian immigrants frames the epistemological parameters and political vocabulary of immigration and naturalization reform.

This article explores how colonial law in India interacted with the construction of caste rank (varna) between 1860 and 1930. It specifically tracks contestations over Kayasthas’ legal varna rank in northern and eastern India through various inheritance disputes, threading them together to shed light on how courts sought to anchor their interpretations of Hindu law around the Indian jurisprudential conceptions of varna. It examines the successes and failures of Kayasthas to have favorable legal rulings that would uphold their status as “twice-born”/dvija, demonstrating that colonial law was limited in its ability (and often indifferent) to construct caste ranks. Inconsistent ruling in provincial courts pushed Kayasthas to seek taxonomic recognition as “twice-born” in the colonial census, demonstrating how colonial law and taxonomy intersected in novel ways. This article argues that by taking a novel approach to Indian social history through the prism of law, we can enrich our understanding of how modern notions of caste and social rank were constructed in colonial India.

In eighteenth-century, colonial Sri Lanka, the Dutch church kept extensive registers of the local population. These “school thombos” contain individual registration of baptism, marriage, school attendance and death. This article argues that the school thombos reveal moral control over family life by the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch Reformed Church, while offering locals a legal and religious identity to employ in negotiating the Dutch colonial bureaucracy. These rarely studied registers shed new light on Sri Lankan family history and the practices of Dutch colonialism. What do they tell us about conjunctures of locals with colonial religion in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka? The school thombo was an instrument used to register and regulate family life, with specific functions and uses by different actors. This article explores the format, objectives and use of the school thombo. Why was the school thombo created and who were registered in these sources? What were the micro practices of drawing up the school thombo? The article is supported by several case studies that illustrate how the school thombo found its way into family life while demonstrating the value of written identities.

This paper aims to consider four elements of Burmese constitutional history between 1946 and 1948. The first section considers the negotiations between Burma and the United Kingdom and argues that the debate about whether Burma wanted Dominion status has overlooked the crucial transitional government period. The second section gives a brief overview of the drafting process, paying particular attention to the links between the Indian Constituent Assembly in Delhi and Rangoon. The third section outlines the comparative influences on the Burmese Constitution using the digital humanities and illustrates that the biggest foreign influence was the Irish Constitution of 1937. The final section looks at the Burmese political leadership after World War II along two dimensions—at a nationalist level and at an elite level—and traces some of the links between Burma and Ireland.

This article examines Persian-language orders—parwanas—issued by regimes that succeeded the Mughal Empire in South Asia, to European trading companies. Focussing in particular on the mid-eighteenth-century exchanges between the Nizam of Hyderabad; the Nawab of Arcot; and the French Compagnie des Indes, we see how Mughal-style parwanas, or sub-imperial orders, previously used to give instructions or to make or withdraw grants, were transformed into a form of political currency. They were now used to exchange military and fiscal resources between South Asian state-builders and militarised European corporations, and to secure political legitimacy for all within a putative Mughal imperium. Moreover, the legal fiction of Mughal sovereignty led to a grants race, such that rivals—European and South Asian—sought more and more parwanas, while also querying the legitimacy of authorities that issued them. The very fragility of the Mughal empire and the lability of the political landscape in eighteenth-century South Asia was thus generative of prolific Persian legal documentation, as well as its rewiring to novel uses. European empire-builders negotiated this legal landscape with only partial literacy, consequently fetishizing the material aspects and ceremonial accompaniments of Persian legal documents, and according them power beyond their immediate substance.

“They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death,” Jonathan Swift famously wrote of the fictional island of Lilliput in Gulliver's Travels. Appearing as an epigraph of Edward Balleisen's Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff, it invites comparison of Lilliput with the United States, not least because it is paired with a 2007 quotation from the former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who was rather more philosophical about fraud. As the world teetered on the edge of economic crisis, he wrote it off as a regrettable but inevitable part of “the way human nature functions,” suggesting that “what successful economies do is keep it to a minimum.” Looking backward, Balleisen finds greater ambivalence in the historical record, as a matter of both human psychology and American law. From the nation's founding, he observes, “the country's lionization of entrepreneurial freedom has given aid and comfort to the perpetrators of duplicitous schemes.” But this is not to say that they have been allowed to act with impunity. To the contrary, their creative deceptions have inspired a wide array of anti-fraud initiatives, operating “at the leading edge of regulatory innovation.” In chronicling these conflicting and conflicted pursuits of profit and justice over the course of two centuries of American history, Balleisen brilliantly elucidates an enduring dilemma of governance: how to promote ingenuity without undermining “‘the capital of confidence upon which all progress depends.’”

In the fall of 1989, the queer community became embroiled in a fierce debate over whether to press for marriage rights. Two attorneys from Lambda Legal, a leading gay and lesbian rights organization, set out the competing considerations in the pages of Out/Look, a community magazine. Tom Stoddard, the then-executive director, argued that the movement should prioritize marriage rights because that strategy provided the surest path to equality. Paula Ettelbrick, Lambda's Legal Director, disagreed. She conceded that marriage provided “the ultimate form of acceptance” and “an insider status of the most powerful kind.” That fact, however, was the problem. Gays and lesbians, she argued, should not be focused on assimilating to the mainstream, but rather should pursue justice for those who were different.

Scholars are still unsure why American cities passed cross-dressing bans over the closing decades of the nineteenth century. By the 1960s, cities in every region of the United States had cross-dressing regulations, from major metropolitan centers to small cities and towns. They were used to criminalize gender non-conformity in many forms - for feminists, countercultural hippies, cross-dressers (or “transvestites”), and people we would now consider transgender. Starting in the late 1960s, however, criminal defendants began to topple cross-dressing bans.

The story of their success invites a re-assessment of the contemporary LGBT movement’s legal history. This article argues that a trans legal movement developed separately but in tandem with constitutional claims on behalf of gays and lesbians. In some cases, gender outlaws attempted to defend the right to cross-dress without asking courts to understand or adjudicate their gender. These efforts met with mixed success: courts began to recognize their constitutional rights, but litigation also limited which gender outlaws could qualify as trans legal subjects. Examining their legal strategies offers a window into the messy process of translating gender non-conforming experiences and subjectivities into something that courts could understand. Transgender had to be analytically separated from gay and lesbian in life and law before it could be reattached as a distinct minority group.

In 2021, Anna Lvovsky published Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life Before Stonewall with the University of Chicago Press. The book studies gay communities’ confrontations with criminal law in the mid-twentieth-century United States. Lvovsky, a professor of law and affiliate professor of history at Harvard University, pays particularly close attention to law enforcement practices that aimed to police homosexuality, as well as “the gay world's confrontations with the law.” What results is a complex story of regulation and contestation that spans several decades, which is poised to not only influence how historians understand the policing of sexual difference, but also push forward understandings of the United States war on crime and the inter-related rise of the carceral state.